An Interesting Angle….

Sounds just like the kind of practical joke a 21 year old would think up.

Seems pat.

Rick

Well, there was a history program on TV which studied the papers (cannot remember the name of that program for the life of me!) which utilized objective document experts who testified that they were in Dahlgren’s hand despite the seeming misspelling of the man’s last name. A computer generated study clearly showed that ink had bled through from the other side of the paper causing the appearance of the wrongly spelled last name. That fact, plus many other points of reference caused the experts to declare that the papers were in Dahlgren’s hand and were therefore NOT forgeries. This makes much more sense than believing that the Confederates were stupid enough to misspell the name of the man involved given that ADMIRAL Dahlgren was sufficiently well known to assure a correct spelling of the name!

Furthermore, it would have taken some considerable time to manufacture any forgeries. I believe that these papers were forthcoming very soon after the incident in which Dahlgren was killed. That didn’t leave a whole lot of time to produce papers that would stand up under scrutiny.

In the alternative, for sufficient time to exist to create reasonable forgeries would have meant that the Confederates were aware of the whole operation and who was involved and that the papers were “on sight” at the time Dahlgren ran into the group of Confederates who killed him. That makes even less sense than the belief that reasonably credible forgeries were created virtually within hours of the incident. Remember, not only would credible forgeries have had to be created, but the plan itself including the names of those involved would have had to be “dreamed up” within a remarkably short period of time.

So, if we’re going to believe that the papers allegedly found on Dahlgren were, in fact, forgeries, then we have to believe that someone in Richmond was able to take advantage of an unplanned encounter, find out the names of those involved, think of up a sufficiently reasonable plan that a man like Robert E. Lee would not immediately recognize as a tissue of lies, create forged papers outlining that plan and then announce it to the world not months or weeks after the fact, but days or hours. If the Confederate government had had that kind of mental acuity available in Richmond, the results of the war might have been very different indeed.

I believe that there is sufficient proof to show that the Union government FROM THE VERY TOP ON DOWN, had decided upon a different kind of warfare – and that kind of warfare did not shrink from the type of plan that Ulrich Dahlgren and Judson Kilpatrick set forth to accomplish.

Frankly, I really have trouble understanding the need to “prove” that the papers were a forgery – especially so long after the fact – and that this was not a premeditated, well planned and supported strategic undertaking by the Union. Indeed, I doubt very much that had the raid been successful, today’s historians would have had much of a problem accepting its “legitimacy” and perhaps even praising its efficacy – at least given everything else that happened with which they apparently find no problem.